Law Commons^™

Supreme Court Nomination John G. Roberts: Hearing Before The S. Comm. On The Judiciary, 109th Cong., Sept. 15, 2005 (Statement Of Peter B. Edelman, Prof. Of Law, Geo. U. L. Center), Peter B. Edelman

Testimony Before Congress

No abstract provided.

For Whom Does The Bell Toll: The Bell Tolls For Brown?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

This review essay analyzes Derrick Bell's provocative new book, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (2004). In Silent Covenants, Professor Bell reviews Brown v. Board of Education, and inquires "whether another approach than the one embraced by the Brown decision might have been more effective and less disruptive in the always-contentious racial arena." Specifically, Professor Bell joins black conservatives in critiquing what he describes as a misguided focus on achieving racial balance in schools and argues that the quality of education for minority children, in particular Blacks, would have been better today …

The Impact Of International Human Rights Developments On Sexual Minority Rights, Arthur S. Leonard

Articles & Chapters

The Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) marked the first time that tribunal took notice of how foreign and international courts were dealing with the civil rights claims of lesbians and gay men as part of its discussion of American constitutional law. If this evinces a new openness by the Court to looking at such external sources in gay rights cases, what would it find on the major legal issues now facing the LGBT community in the United States? This article summarizes developments abroad on legal recognition of same-sex partners (including for purposes of immigration status) and military …

Counter-Stories: Maintaining And Expanding Civil Liberties In Wartime, Mark A. Graber

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Majoritarian Difficulty: Affirmative Action, Sodomy, And Supreme Court Politics, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

This Article challenges liberal and conservative assessments of Lawrence, Gratz, and Grutter. Although the outcome of these cases might indeed prove helpful to the agendas of social movements for racial and sexual justice, progressive scholars and activists should not receive these cases with elation. Instead, the research of constitutional theorists, critical legal scholars, and political scientists allows for a more contextualized and guarded account of and reaction to these decisions. Instead of representing extraordinary victories for oppressed classes, these cases reflect majoritarian and moderate views concerning civil rights, and the opinions contain many doctrinal elements that reinforce, …

Review Of David E. Bernstein's "You Can't Say That!--The Growing Threat To Civil Liberties From Antidiscrimination Laws", Ivan E. Bodensteiner

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Jack And Jill Go To Court: Litigating A Peer Sexual Harassment Case Under Title Ix, Susan P. Stuart

Law Faculty Publications

Title IX peer sexual harassment cases present challenges to litigators because of the unique educational environment in which these cases arise. This Article attempts to educate litigators on the prima facie case, evidentiary issues, and the overall presentation of peer sexual harassment cases.

The Politics Of Infertility: Recognizing Coverage Exclusions As Discrimination, Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

Infertility affects approximately ten percent of the reproductive-age population in the United States, and strikes people of every race, ethnicity and socio-economic level. It is recognized by the medical community as a disease, one with devastating physical, psychological, and financial effects.

In 1998, the Supreme Court held in Bragdon v. Abbott that reproduction is a major life activity within the meaning of the ADA. Many lawyers, activists and scholars thought that coverage for infertility treatment would follow soon after. In fact, in 2003 in the first major case applying Bragdon to health benefits, Saks v. Franklin Covey, the Second Circuit …

True Integration: Advancing Brown's Goal Of Educational Equity In The Wake Of Grutter, Lia Epperson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, founder of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund ("LDF"), and head of the legal team that litigated Brown v. Board of Education,' knew well the challenges that desegregation posed in a nation founded on a system of racial subjugation and white supremacy. A full thirty years after Brown, he acknowledged: Desegregation is not and was never expected to be an easy task. Racial attitudes ingrained in our Nation's childhood and adolescence are not quickly thrown aside in its middle years.... In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow …

Sacred Visions Of Law, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Around the time of the Bicentennial Celebration of the U.S. Constitution's framing, Professor Sanford Levinson called upon Americans to renew our constitutional faith. This article answers the call by examining how two legal symbols - Marbury v. Madison and Brown v. Board of Education - have been used by jurists over the years to tend the American community of faith. Blending constitutional theory and the study of religious form, the article argues that the decisions have become increasingly linked in the legal imagination even as they have come to signify very different sacred visions of law. One might think that …

Dignity In Race Jurisprudence, Christopher A. Bracey

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Racial justice demands dignity; the acknowledgment and affirmation of the equal humanity of people of color. Denying dignity on the basis of color creates racial subordination, which triggers dignitary harms such as individual acts of racism and communal exclusion leading to diminished health, wealth, income, employment and social status. The legal recognition of dignity is therefore a prerequisite to political and social equality. For Americans of African descent, dignity was long denied by the legal endorsement of slavery and the degrading policies of segregation. The struggle to be treated equally human eventually found success in landmark cases such as Brown …

Two "Wrongs" Do/Can Make A Right: Remembering Mathematics, Physics, & Various Legal Analogies (Two Negatives Make A Positive; Are Remedies Wrong?) The Law Has Made Him Equal, But Man Has Not, John C. Duncan Jr

Journal Publications

This article demonstrates the incomplete logic and inconsistent legal reasoning used in the argument against affirmative action. The phrase "two wrongs don't make a right" is often heard in addressing various attempts to equalize, to balance, and to correct the acknowledged wrongs of slavery and segregation and their derivative effects. Yet, "two wrongs do/can make a right" has a positive connotation. This article reviews the history of societal and judicial wrongs against Blacks, as well as the evolution of the narrowing in legal reasoning concerning discrimination against minorities, including Blacks. Next, the legal reasoning behind legacy programs will be reviewed …

Statutes Of Limitations: A Policy Analysis In The Context Of Reparations Litigation, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

This article discusses the underlying policy rationales for statutes of limitations and their exceptions, as demonstrated by Supreme Court precedents. This article explores limitations law in the context of a case brought by African-American survivors of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 who sought restitution from the local government for its participation in one of the worst race riots in American history, in violation of their constitutional and federal civil rights. Using the Tulsa case as an exemplar, this article analyzes the propriety of the case’s dismissal as time-barred, and contends that this outcome was unwarranted under precedents and failed …

The Constitution Glimpsed From Tule Lake, Patrick O. Gudridge

Articles

No abstract provided.

Retaliation, Deborah Brake

Articles

This Article takes a comprehensive look at retaliation and its place in discrimination law. The Article begins by examining current social science literature to understand how retaliation operates as a social practice to silence challenges to discrimination and preserve inequality. Then, using the recent controversy over whether to imply a private right of action for retaliation from a general ban on discrimination as a launching point, the Article theorizes the connections between retaliation and discrimination as legal constructs, and contends that retaliation should be viewed as a species of intentional discrimination. The Article argues that situating retaliation as a practice …

Sacred Visions Of Law, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

Around the time of the Bicentennial Celebration of the U.S. Constitution's framing, Professor Sanford Levinson called upon Americans to renew our constitutional faith. This article answers the call by examining how two legal symbols - Marbury v. Madison and Brown v. Board of Education - have been used by jurists over the years to tend the American community of faith. Blending constitutional theory and the study of religious form, the article argues that the decisions have become increasingly linked in the legal imagination even as they have come to signify very different sacred visions of law. One might think that …

Discrimination Against The Unhealthy In Health Insurance, Mary Crossley

Articles

As employers seek to contain their health care costs and politicians create coverage mechanisms to promote individual empowerment, people with health problems increasingly are forced to shoulder the load of their own medical costs. The trend towards consumerism in health coverage shifts not simply costs, but also insurance risk, to individual insureds, and the results may be particularly dire for people in poor health. This Article describes a growing body of research showing that unhealthy people can be expected disproportionately to pay the price for consumerism, not only in dollars, but in preventable disease and disability as well. In short, …

Terror And Race, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The United States is now engaged in an internationally prominent war on terror. That war, however, is being waged in a way that threatens to cause the same types of harm to the democratic values of the United States that the Nation's terrorist enemies are hoping to inflict. Foreign terrorists are attempting to undermine the fundamental liberties that United States culture claims to hold dear. But those are the same liberties that our own government has asked us to forego in its effort to win the war on terror. The paradoxical irony entailed in the United States government's demand that …

Constitutive Commitments And Roosevelt's Second Bill Of Rights: A Dialogue, Randy E. Barnett, Cass R. Sunstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What made the Second Bill of Rights possible? Part of the answer lies in a simple idea, one pervasive in the American legal culture during Roosevelt's time: No one really opposes government intervention. Markets and wealth depend on government. Without government creating and protecting property rights, property itself cannot exist. Even the people who most loudly denounce government interference depend on it every day. Their own rights do not come from minimizing government but are a product of government. Political scientist Lester Ward vividly captured the point: "[T]hose who denounce state intervention are the ones who most frequently and successfully …

Hands Off Policy: Equal Protection And The Contact Sports Exemption Of Title Ix, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Before becoming a poster child for gender equity in athletics, Heather Sue Mercer was an all-state place kicker at Yorktown Heights High School in Yorktown Heights, New York (pop. 7,972). She enrolled at Duke University in the fall of 1994 and decided to become the first woman ever to try out for the Duke football team. Initially she failed to make the team as a walk-on, but the following spring she was invited by the seniors on the team to play in the annual Blue-White scrimmage. She ended up kicking a game-winning twenty-eight-yard field goal. Afterwards, Duke head coach Fred …

The Other Sullivan Case, Garrett Epps, Garrett Epps

All Faculty Scholarship

The standard triumphalist narrative of NEW YORK TIMES V. SULLIVAN celebrates the Supreme Court's defense of free speech and press in the case's vindication of powerful journalistic institution. Ignored in this story is the story of the local defendants, civil rights leaders in Alabama who had their solvency threatened by the state courts' vindictive action against them. These defendants challenged the segregated proceedings used in court to affix liability to them—but the Supreme Court ignored their arguments and ignored the racial-equality and individual-rights aspects of the case. From their point of view, SULLIVAN might be so unalloyed a triumph.

Intertwining Of Poverty, Gender, And Race: A Critical Analysis Of Welfare News Coverage From 1993-2000, Deseriee A. Kennedy

Scholarly Works

Over the years, welfare has become highly intertwined with ideological beliefs involving gender, race, and poverty. As the nature of welfare transformed to include non-white recipients, the perception of welfare recipients as single "worthy white widows" was replaced by the "lazy African-American breeders." This study examined how television news may have appropriated this negative image in its coverage of the changes in the U.S. welfare system that took place during the 1990s. News stories presented by the major U.S. television networks from 1993 to 2000 were examined. The analysis showed that news stories tended to depict the typical welfare recipient …